Chapter Text
Pomni had gotten out, she had used a rope held by the others to plunge into the void to look for an escape, but she had no idea that she would lock up like she had on that first day. It was like her soul was ripped from her digital form and shoved back into her human body without warning. The sensations were overwhelming, and it felt like every nerve on her body was exposed to the air now.
The memory of her leaving was a little fuzzy, but she remembered basically kicking everyone from the Circus, and the server shutting off. They were all out, everyone was safe. She had weakly made her way down the rickety stairs and towards the entrance of the building. She remembered flagging down a car outside the old C&A building, it had been lightly raining and her joints were stiff from being put in some sort of weird stasis. She had asked the person she flagged down to use their phone to call someone, she found a little emergency contact sheet in the bag she was carrying, 'thanks for thinking ahead' she thought to herself. The first number went to voicemail, before calling back almost immediately. "Christine?" It was a woman she could only assume was her mother on the other end, and her body reacted. "... Umma?" Pomni felt strange, she had forgotten her own name and her mother's nickname for so long (nine months, she later learned) that the usage felt foreign. She silently thanked her muscle memory for that.
Her mother picked her up, finding her sitting on the side of the C&A building parking-lot sidewalk with her knees to her chest. Her mother, after their tearful-yet-hazy reunion, brought her to the nearest hospital. Christine had grown frail but was overall well considering the circumstances. She wasn't sure how she survived being in the Circus with no food or water, or where her body came back from; it was like she was in a non-physical stasis pod of sorts. She was as honest with the doctors as she could be: She told them that she was being held in an abandoned building, that she had no memory of her time there, and that she wasn't sure who kept her there. A bit of a lie, but if she told them she was being held by a creature made of dentures and eyes in a video game, they would send her to the psych ward indefinitely.
Pomni's stay in the hospital was longer than she was hoping. The doctors diagnosed her with Traumatic Amnesia and Dissociative Amnesia, they had done tests and scans of her brain and determined that at some point she had a TBI during her stay there. How the hell that would happen from inside a computer, she had no clue, but it could also be in part to her lying about not remembering everything. To give her credit, she didn't remember what happened to her body during the nine months she was in the circus. She also had developed pneumonia and a bit of mold poisoning, so they kept her for observation, longer than usual for the combination of the problems.
She had developed a habit of staring out the windows of her hospital room, watching the birds fly and the New Hampshire wind blow through the trees. It was late May when she returned to the real world, she had missed the holidays with her family. She wondered which adventure she was busy on as they opened Christmas presents, or what she was up to when the year finally passed over.
Pomni and her mother talked, though not much real conversation happened. It was mostly catching her up on the last nine months of family events and updates. Her parents had apparently gotten a puppy in her absence but according to her mom "As much as we love little Toby, he didn't fill the void you left." When she said it, it pulled her back to the Circus for a millisecond, but at least her Mom left shortly after that conversation, seeing as the doctors needed to do more tests.
The doctors had Christine taking medications for her symptoms, mainly for the TBI she might have. The antidepressants and mood-stabilizers helped her forget some of the worse memories of the Circus, alligator jaws and gigantic spider-like limbs were now a distant memory. The thoughts that lingered though, were somehow worse than the ones that were hazy. Did anyone else actually make it out? Did they think she died? Did Kinger ever let go of his regrets, and did Ragatha ever find it in her heart to let go of her terrible mother? Did Gangle find success, and did she ever meet up with Zooble?
Did Jax make it out intact, is he safe, is he with someone he trusts? Did he meet up with anyone from the Circus either? These thoughts haunted Pomni. He had nearly thrown himself into the void, thinking it would end him, and she caught him at the last second. If he did get out, she prayed to no god in particular that he was close-by. After she was out of the hospital, she caught herself looking at random people in the street. Looking for familiar smiles and frowns, similar voices and laughs and shouts. She hated to admit it, but out of everyone she looked for she looked mostly for Jax. Pomni doubted he looked anything like his Circus counterpart. He probably had a moody-emotional air about him, maybe the same age as her or younger based on what she learned about him.
She was eventually released once she was determined stable, but still had biweekly follow-ups. She moved back in with her parents short-term, they had kept her car safe for her while she was missing, but her old apartment had been re-leased to someone new. They kept most of her stuff safe, but her old scumbag landlords must've took some of her more expensive collectables and her expensive camera to sell off while she was missing. She was already exhausted with the reality of existing as a real person again, so she laid that problem to rest with the Circus. She put a corn themed keychain on her regained keys, with the intention to show it to strangers to maybe find Jax, but figured that would be a little more than strange if she followed through on that part.
Pomni would hum Daisy Bell front time to time during quiet moments, her Dad catching her on occasion and now he had a habit of sending her renditions of the tune through her new phone. Whether it made it better or worse, she didn't think too hard about it. During her free time, she would take drives down to the coast to gaze out at the water. It reminded her of the digital lake, the silly sunken treasure sharks, Ragatha's button eye. If she stayed late, she would get her own personal stargazing adventure. She missed the Circus sometimes, though not the lack of agency or privacy, she missed her friends and the real connections they had made through shared trauma. Some of the adventures were fun, some were hell, but she felt nostalgic for the former. She would pick out the constellations that carried between the two worlds: Ursa Major, Leo, Orion. Canis Major reminded her of the Circus member Kinger spoke of toward the end, the one she never met outside his crossed out door-sign, Scratch.
The weeks after her hospital stay turned to months, Christine got another job though not quite as good as the last couple on her resume. She figured that if she got out of the Brentwood, and towards Portsmouth area she would have a better chance of connecting to people who knew about C&A, so after haggling with her parents to be independent once more she moved to the area. It was a small dingy apartment as a blank slate, but after moving what belongings her parents scavenged from her old place it became somewhat more lively. Her job was a street electrical laborer for the city. Fixing traffic lights and signs, checking the light change rate, and controlling traffic at times when lights were out. It wasn't as lucrative as her past accountant job, or as peaceful as the part time library job she had worked before this, but it got her out in the field and it was a step away from programming workers who might know more about where the others could be. She would wake up, get dressed in her gear, grab her work bag, and do her things for the day. The tasks changed from day to day as she was needed, not an uncomfortable pace from when she was in the Circus. The changing activities soothed the wound that needed different stimuli daily, maybe she had ADHD but she didn't know for sure.
Christine had been called to fix a traffic light on a curved road to the north of the city, the street was fairly open, next to a park in a historical side of town. She was near the border crossing over into Maine, busy using her light controller on the side of the small road. It was the last job of the evening, the sun starting to set so she was tasked with getting the sensor working before sundown. It was an easy fix, and she packed up her equipment back into her car parked on the side of the road. Another car, a brown beat up sedan pulled over ahead of her. 'Oh great, a creep.' Pomni thought to herself, and took account of the pepper spray in her khaki cargo jeans.
A dark-skinned lanky guy in a grey sweatshirt & band-tee combo popped out of the car. Her guard dropped a shred, his expression was tired but pleasant. "Hey!" the man called, he couldn't be much younger than her,and it was strange to talk to anyone between work unless they were letting her know about more work needed done. Her expression shifted from suspicion to familiarity, his vibe seemed to suggest they knew each-other. Maybe he was from her hometown, maybe he was a past coworker?
"Hey," he sighed a breath, "...just wanted to thank you for fixing the light. It has been a pain in my ass for the last few months, so I promised myself if I saw someone working on it finally I would give them a thank you, so here: A card to the Elephantine Bakery. It shouldn't be far from here, so treat yourself after you're done." His voice sounded a little rehearsed, like he had been frustrated with the traffic light and kept this in his backpocket until he saw someone working on it. God, where did she know him from?
A gut feeling filled her senses, before he made his way back to his car she called after him. "Hey! Wait, do I know you?" Pomni yelled out to him. He yelled back "No? Why?", and made his way back in her direction. She looked hard at him, face not registering but voice sounding so so familiar. She pulled her keychain out, and shoved it in his face. "Thought's on this corn keychain?" She huffed, one last ditch effort to either use or throw away this chance at finding her friend.
The man cringed, "It's kinda weird, and gross...?"
She blinked, and then he blinked.
She smiled, and weakly asked "Jax?"
His face contorted into a relieved, almost pained expression "...Pomni?"